STUDIO: THINKFilm
RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2008
STARRING: Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea
WRITTEN BY: John Strysik
DIRECTED BY: Stuart Gordon
GENRE: Drama
RATING: R

On paper, Stuck sounds just awful. I tell people what it's about and who's in it and even who directed it, and they look at me like I'm crazy when I add "yeah, and it's pretty good." Stuck has clearly been a struggle for its distributor too, as the film played festivals last year (it showed here at the Chicago International Film Festival nearly eight months ago) and looked like it might never get a wide release. Now, it's opening in arthouses across the country, starting in L.A. on the 30th and now in Chicago and moving on to other markets. Stuck is based on the true story of a woman who hit a homeless man on her way home from work and left him trapped halfway through her windshield, slowing bleeding to death in her garage. American Beauty's Mena Suvari plays the woman and the always-great Stephen Rea plays the poor victim. And all of it is brought to you by horror icon Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond). A drama from a horror director is a tough-enough sell, but when one of the characters spends most of the film halfway jammed through a shield of glass, it's pretty difficult to cut a snappy preview together. And yet, Stuck is one of the more original and fascinating dramas of the year, at least for two-thirds of its running time. It falls apart in the end, but it's still worth seeing for the great work by Rea and Suvari and the further proof that Gordon is a masterful storyteller when he's clicking on all cylinders. It's his best film in years.

Stuck is part drama, part social commentary, part thriller, and yet it's being advertised and sold as a horror movie because of its director's pedigree. However, it's definitely not a traditional horror movie. It features some pretty horrific behavior and scenes, but don't expect Saw or even The Strangers. With a pretty impressive car set and a high red corn-syrup budget, Stuck could practically be a play (although the final act would be hard to pull off without damage). Stuck is a horror film only in the sense that true-life terror can be much harder to watch than the fictional variety. Rea plays Tom Bardo, a middle-aged man who loses his job and ends up on the street. Brandi's (Suvari) life is moving in the other direction, having just received a big promotion and going out on the town to celebrate it. After a night of partying, Brandi hits Tom so hard that the poor guy gets stuck in her car's windshield. Brandi panics, drives home, and tells Tom that she's going inside to call for help. She doesn't. But she can't bring herself to finish Tom off, so she decides to let him suffer in that windshield until he dies, thus making him a much easier (and undoubtedly quieter) problem to deal with. The social commentary - that homeless men and women are dying while most of us do nothing - is hard to ignore, and Rea and Suvari do an incredible job of making this shocking story feel believable. (However, it's a pretty sad commentary on our times that such a stomach-churning scenario didn't originate in the mind of a horror director, but rather came straight out of the six o'clock news.)

Stuart Gordon has had a fascinating-yet-unheralded resurgence in the last few years. He bounced back from a career that looked pretty much over to direct two of the better episodes of Showtime's Masters of Horror series (his second season effort, "The Black Cat", was arguably the best of the entire series) and has now made two films - Edmond and Stuck - both with horrific subtexts and some awful behavior, but that feel light years away from Re-Animator. Both films present a dark underbelly of society that is far more disturbing than any zombie movie released in the last few years. Gordon can still tell a story and it's simply great to have him back in the game. The recent news that he's tabled his proposed relaunching of the Re-Animator franchise is disheartening but also not surprising, considering the trend in his work towards more realistic horror.

One thing that Stuck does share with traditional horror movies is that, like a lot of them, it does miss the ending. The real story ended much differently than the movie version and, while the true tragedy might have left audiences with a non-ending, the over-the-top creation in its place is similarly dissatisfying. It's a minor misstep that keeps the film back from being truly excellent. But, regardless, this is not an easy film to shake off and will lodge in the memory of movie goers much more powerfully than most of its disposable summer competition. Stuck may be a tough sell on paper, but anyone who sees it should help the word-of-mouth spread. Do your part.